Academic Communitarianism

Communitarianism is a social philosophy that, in contrast to theories that emphasize the centrality of the individual, emphasizes the importance of society in articulating the good. Communitarianism is often contrasted with liberalism, a theory which holds that each individual should formulate the good on his or her own. Communitarians examine the ways shared conceptions of the good are formed, transmitted, justified, and enforced. Hence, their interest in communities (and moral dialogues within them), the historical transmission of values and mores, and the societal units that transmit and enforce values – such as the family, schools, and voluntary associations (including places of worship), which are all parts of communities. Although the term “communitarian” was coined only in the mid-nineteenth century, ideas that are communitarian in nature can be found in the Old and New Testaments, Catholic theology (e.g., emphasis on the church as community, and more recently on subsidiarity), Fabian and socialist doctrine (e.g., writings about the early commune and about workers’ solidarity), and the writings of Edmund Burke. In recent decades, there have been two major waves of communitarianism: the academic communitarianism of the 1980s, and the responsive communitarianism of the 1990s. The academic communitarians of the 1980s were a small group of political theorists concerned with outlining the “social dimension” of the person. Responsive communitarians, also called political or neocommunitarians, were a group of scholars and policy-makers who, in the 1990s, stressed that societies cannot be based on one normative principle, and that both individual rights and the common good are major sources of normativity, without either one being a priori privileged.